o that the river reflected the monument like a
looking-glass.

"You seemed to me very wonderful this morning," she said.

He turned to her.

"If I were thirty years younger you wouldn't say that to me with
impunity."

"If you were thirty years younger you would seem like an inefficient boy
compared to what you are now." Her face, her eyes, her whole body
expressed the admiration she felt for his powers.

There was a little silence; then he said gravely, "If I could only
persuade myself that it was possible that a girl of your age could love
a man of mine----" Lydia caught her underlip in a white tooth--she had
not meant love--she had not thought it a question of that. His
sensitive egotism understood her thought without any spoken word, and he
added, "And I should be content with nothing else--nothing else, Lydia."

In all her cogitation on the possibility of her marriage with the
governor she had somehow never thought of his expecting her to love
him--to be in love with him.

She walked on a few steps, and then said, "I don't think I shall ever be
in love--I never have. I feel for you a more serious respect and
admiration than I have ever felt for anyone, man or woman."

"And what do you feel for this little blond whippersnapper who is always
under your feet?"

"For Bobby?" Her surprise was genuine that his name should be dragged
into a serious discussion. "I feel affection for Bobby. He is very
useful and kind. I could never love him. Oh, mercy no!"

"Do you mean to say," said Albee, "you have never felt--you have never
had a man take you in his arms, and say to yourself as he did, 'This is
living'?"

"No, no, no, no! Never, never!" said Lydia. She lied passionately, so
passionately that she never stopped to remember that she was lying. "I
don't want to feel like that. You don't understand me, governor. To feel
what I feel for you is more, much more than----"

She stopped without finishing her sentence.

"You make me very proud, very happy when you talk like that," said
Albee. "I certainly never expected that the happiest time of my
life--these last few weeks--would come to me after I was fifty. I
wonder," he added, turning and looking her over with a sort of paternal
amusement which she had grown to like--"I wonder if there were really
girls like you in my own time, if I had had sense enough to find them."

Lydia, who was under the impression that her whole future was being
settled there and then in